In After War: The Weight of Life At Walter Reed, Zoë Wool shares her experience working with some of the most grievously wounded veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. During a year of research from 2007-2008, Wool conducted fieldwork …

In today’s “Top of the heap,” Ken MacLeish, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Medicine, Health and Society at Vanderbilt University, takes us into the world of war (and post-war) memoir, fiction and ethnography, also introducing us to some conceptual texts he’s been thinking with.

Finley’s portrayal of the difficulties of soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq elegantly interweaves narratives and analysis. Drawing on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork in San Antonio, Texas, involving 133 study participants (62 of which were veterans), Finley conveys …

“They didn’t get into the details of real life, the little things,” a troubled U.S. war veteran criticizes a PTSD primer for returning soldiers in Kenneth MacLeish’s ethnography Making War at Fort Hood. …

During the recent government shutdown, denial of the “death gratuity” to families of recently deceased veterans of the war in Afghanistan allowed people on both sides of a glaring political divide to condemn an unacceptable form of abandonment. Even in a climate of austerity, war deaths and injuries carry unquestioned obligations. It would seem that determining which fatalities fall into …